Another alumnus of PC Gamer‘s Long Play series, slightly remixed and expanded

A ninja dressed in gaudy blue has just grabbed hold of the eyesockets of his opponent and torn his head clear of his body, dangling a couple of feet of glistening wet spinal cord behind him. Cue screams from the horrified Tabloids. Gamers laughed at or with it, depending on their temperament. It’s 1993, and Mortal Kombat, in terms of press controversy, is the Grand Theft Auto of its day. But only in those terms. Anyone who actually plays it understands that this game exists purely in the Grand Guignol traition of video nasties, a comedy fountain of gore. It was just slapstick with a very sharp stick.

It wasn’t bad to the bone.
Conversely, Syndicate was the meanest bastard that the world had ever seen. If you want to find out about the path that lead to GTA, you start with the four gentleman with the trenchcoats, mirrorshades and miniguns, sitting in the corner. Syndicate didn’t get the bad press for a handful of reasons. Firstly, it was primarily on the PC and Amiga, with the corresponding lower public profile. But most importantly, to really understand how grotesquely immoral it was, you had to play it. And playing a game? Well, that’s the one thing the reactionary end of the press will never consider.

Syndicate positioned you as commander of four cybernetically enhanced goons of a global corporation. Your task was building a new world order, one hostile take-over of a country at a time. After receiving your mission and being left in the city, it’s up to achieve it by any means possible. Normally, this will be wiping out opposing corporate agents, but other things to see and do in the near future include rescue, escort, brainwashing and assassination. It distinguished itself by being one of the earliest examples of a convincing living city. People wandered the streets, going about their daily business before having their routine (and often fleshy bodies) exploded by corporate conflict in the high street. Cars patrol the street, and can often be commandeered with a burst of UZI fire. Cops desperately try to keep the peace…

Then, this was all shockingly new. Emphasis on the word “shocking”.

My first experience of Syndicate was the demo on cheery PC Gamer progenitor Amiga Format’s coverdisk. My brother and I were excited anyway. For the time, it was beautifully marketed. Photo-lead adverts of hands hanging of a chainlink fence with a pollution-painted city in the background were – in fact, still are – a few steps classier than the competition. The British cover – which you’ll find heading this feature, is far more attractive than the American version. We both loved cyberpunk fiction, and in a world dominated by cheery platformers were ready for some of the dark stuff. Hell: Living in dreary Stafford even urban decay seemed terribly glamorous.

Within seconds, we’re running rampage through the streets. I’m controlling, with my brother shouting short suggestions of what to do next. Weapons are pulled from jacket and any of the civilians who see them scatter, running for their lives. Cops start firing and are dropped with a burst of fire, the bullets of which we’ll mentally make notes to charge to our expense accounts later. A car pulls around the corner, and we open fire. It slides to a halt, its passengers getting out and running for their lives. Another couple of bursts and the car explodes, bodies flying everywhere.

We’re both wearing our biggest Bad Boy grins when something makes our faces fall. It’s a noise. High pitched and sharp, it cuts through the general aural melee of a city firefight. We realise its coming from the tiny people. They’re on fire. The explosion must have sprayed them with petrol or something, and now they’re reduced to living torches: Living torches in incredible pain. We sit, dumbfounded and disturbed. My brother’s the first to speak: “Kill them”. I open fire, trying to put them out of their misery…

I keep a list of the emotions games have provoked in me. This was the first time one had ever given me the vertiginous sensation of moral repugnance at myself. In the end, the burning people from car explosions were cut from the final version of Syndicate, saved for the appearance of the flamethrower later. It was still a uniquely brutal effect. The choice of sound effect was masterful, and I can still recall the pitch and attack of that noise and feel it race down my spine – I ended up connecting my Amiga to my soundsystem to play it at higher volumes, which turned my bedroom into a riotzone. Even the tiny animation was suggestive enough to let your mind fill in the gaps of flesh melting away from bone.

It’s one of the reasons why Syndicate still sticks with me. It was phenomenally ahead of its time. While I’d argue that Syndicate’s cities were more advanced than anything previously, even if they weren’t, what the game used them for was. It was stripped down from what Bullfrog had talked up for BOB, the game which Syndicate grew into. In BoB characters would, if they were full of peaceful drugs, go and find the owner and get hold of car keys, rather than jacking a ride. Or so went Bullfrog’s always compelling high-concept machine, anyway. You suspect that the version we ended up was far wiser. It simply works. Forget the slaughter and the realistic response of the environment to it. Think of elements like how you manipulated your agents through pumping their bodies with different drugs depending on what you wanted to use them for, or the Persuadertron which allowed you to gather around a mass of consumerist zombies in a ready-made army.

I suppose that’s one of the things which even in these days when everything is taking from GTA’s rampage-in-a-freeform-city mandate that keeps Syndicate precious. For all the nihilism, there was a brain to it, a satirical edge. Multinational agents leading hordes of consumerist zombies to achieve corporate aims? As a pulp object, it makes its point forcibly. What makes it succeed as a game that while all the critique is still there, it simultaneously explains all too well why anyone would want to wield this amount of power through its sheer illicit transgressive thrill. Pulling the trigger on the sniper laser that reduces a politician who wouldn’t play ball to a smudge of ash. Stealing a police car and getting through prison security to rescue someone to paste, and then mowing down every single prisoner for no reason other than seeing their bodies fall in piles at the end of the prison ward. And the final gauss-gun-painted confrontation at the Atlantic Accelerator mission, still one of the most famously challenging end of game missions of all time.

Bad to the bone. But the most evil thing about Syndicate – the thing all its players will answer for if ever dragged before the gates of heaven – is how good being so bad was. There’s that twitch guilt, sure… but the pleasure overwhelms it. Syndicate: a holiday in somebody’s misery – and, worst and best of all, a misery you caused.

Aww man! I already have a slight problem with the fact I have about six games in mid play that I’m yet to finish – and then you guys give me another one I want to go back and play thus taking away more of my time…

The memories.. I still even remember the cheat codes – Marks Team and Coopers Team for infinite money and all upgrades.. I never finished that last level, the framerate in that particular mission was so poor on the old Amiga 500 that it was almost impossible to play it.
You’re writeup sound almost exactly like how it was the first time I played it too. It’s one of the great ones, that’s for sure, and it captured the spirit of William Gibsons visions of Cyperpunk perfectly.

One of the first games I remember playing all the way through and actually finishing.
I remember my favourite tactic was Persuadertron’ing everyone in sight, especially the enemy agents, and running round with a huge army of followers.
Bonus points for cramming them all into a train and turning up at a defended station, cue mayhem as 50-100 armed zombies hop out of the train and start going shooty :)

EA are mental for sitting on this, I regularly fantasise about how great an online, persistent world Syndicate sequel would be. Reliable whispers reached my ear that EA did start work on something a few years back and then canned it before it got anywhere.

for me, back in the day, it was all about: this game, pizza tycoon and master of magic. Two of those have already been mentioned in this post/comments.
Seems im reading the right blog after all :) Keep up the great posts!

I’d love to see someone do justice to a remake of syndicate – not a port as with freesynd, but a nice, graphical update. As long as it kept the old gameplay (perhaps with a few tweaks), I think I’d probably lose hours to taking over the world again.

Blimey, I flippin’ loved this game. It was one of the few games that actually turned out better on the Mac, but which I ended up buying/finishing on the PC. It was just so much fun. Would it actually be as much fun now? I’d like to think so.

Wow… I’ve got a lump in my throat just thinking about Syndicate. I would have been 12 in 1993, and I remember borrowing a cover disk from the son of a friend of my parents’. I was hooked, and still have the CD (or was Syndicate a 3.5″ floppy game? I’ve certainly got the CD from Syndicate Wars) in a drawer at home.

I would love to play it again…. Maybe my rose-tinted glasses will mean that it’s never quite the same, but I can’t not try….

My first PC came with a CD drive, a Creative 4x setup. Bundled with that came gems such as Ultima VIII, Wing Commander 2 & Strike Commander (a real-world spin off of Wing Commander). And Syndicate Plus.

I don’t think I touched Strike Commander nor Ultima for 2-3 years. Wing Commander was done and dusted. Syndicate stayed on 3 successive PCs for years.

Syndicate Wars came and went. It was brilliant with much more inventive missions and gameplay (although it had that infinite ammo/health concept which nackered the difficulty) and there weren’t better weapons than the Nuclear Grenade and the Satellite Bombardment (run into a crowded district, select the marker, tap the right mouse button, RUN!) but the bugs and stability hurt the game and it just wasn’t as gripping as Syndicate.

I wonder who owns the rights to the syndicate IP these days. I mean, EA published Syndicate Wars, but it was still developed by Bullfrog.

Hmm, even Molyneux seems to think there are licensing issues – “Aside from the licensing complications, some sort of next-gen online version of Syndicate would certainly be popular with gamers.” (cvg.com)

I once owned Syndicate Wars. I’m sure I would have thought of it as a great game if I had had any idea about what I could do in it. Things weren’t helped by the facts that I was young, the manual was a tome and on top of it all the whole manual was in a foreign language for some reason.

I don´t know what to say, speaking of Syndicate blocks me because there has been so few games I have been so fascinated like this one. Syndicate is probably the first game I truly felt I was there, the feeling of immersion was perfect thanks to the little details: taking trains, stealing cars, different platforms, great variety, the excellent sound and effects…

As game it was incredible, the variety of missions, the adrenaline rush when you approached slowly to your objective, (with that memorable change of music), the brutality of the missiles launch. And it had a lot of tactical deepness in my opinion. It even had character development and I remember the feeling of frustration when one advanced agent was killed.

But the most evil part of the game was not to flame people or killing civilians. For me, my most evil act was “recruiting” the agent and the mind control system. The act of going in the city and enslaving a random person to be your agent, or using the mind control device to create a cloud of civilians ready to die for your agents. It was a real shock seeing myself in that zeppelin, having a so absolute control of normal people and normal life, which only sin was being in the wrong place and the wrong moment. Syndicate is one of the reasons I become interested in videogames for more reason than being a way of entertainment.

I love the music in this as well. And the mission briefings. I was very young and wild (uh, like 9) back then, and the art style and font in the briefings really stirred my imagination. Me and my mate made our own evil syndicate at school and walked around the playground looking dodgy. Or if it was raining, we’d go indoors and write our own mission briefings (trying to copy the style of the in game ones, down to the exact layout on the screen) for next time we went out!

Awesome writeup of an incredible game. In particular, the mission where you assassinated the senator in the midst of the political rally – surrounded by a throng of hundreds of civilians who it was nearly impossible to resist the urge to gun down – was horribly magnificent.

I never did manage to beat the bloody Atlantic Accelerator. The last levels of Amiga games always seemed insanely hard – someone mentioned Zeewolf above, and the final mission of that I’m pretty sure is nigh impossible as well. I’ll have to go back and try them both again, to see if I still suck as much as I did when I was 9.

Ah yes, the Atlantic Accelerator mission… *shudder* I could get excited about a remake, with the condition that buildings didn’t completely obscure your view. (I could envision a FLIR-type view being very effective.)

I still have the game and the Amiga to run it on, granted it’s lurking at my parents but thankfully they have no idea of the gold mine they are sitting on. I will have to go and reclaim it one day as it was one hell of a game.

I’m sad to say I’ve never played syndicate, but I plead youthful ignorance, m’lud. Does freesynd work under winXP, or does it require the usual DOSbox trickery?
[hyper-nitpick] that “alumni” at the very start of the article should be “alumnus” [/nitpick]

I throw around the idea of making a Syndicate remake about once a week. Mainly because my uni building looks like the game. Especially as it has that whole “two-tier, brown-and-black buildings with chamfered edge” look about it.

You’ve got me playing this again and it’s still bloody good. Some strange behaviour I don’t remember from the Amiga version though; did enemy agents always immediately swarm on your location the minute a mission starts?

Of course now that I’ve got DOSBox installed again I’ll be going back on the Darklands wagon. Best free roaming RPG ever; screw the Elder Scrolls.